14 February 2008

Pretty pictures!

From MathTrek: Math on Display. Apparently there was an exhibition of mathematical art at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Diego last month. Some of it actually arises naturally in considering problems which actually arise. Since I mostly deal in discrete mathematics I don't see the really nice pictures too often in my own work -- they seem to arise more naturally on the continuous side of things -- although certainly there are a lot of results in discrete mathematics that are essentially limit theorems, which often give rise to nice "smooth" pictures.

Although it doesn't arise from a mathematical problem, my favorite of the pictures shown in that post is the picture of Sierpinski made out of tiles which are different iterations of the Sierpinski carpet. There's something deliciously self-referential about it. Now if only there were some set of pictures commonly associated with, say, Gödel...

4 comments:

See also the Calculart show in Lansing, MI. A couple of my things are on display in homage to Tony Robbin. George Francis used to have pictures up of the exhibit, but the link looks to be down now. Any one who wants to order prints of the items on display at the Dennos should contact me. They can be done on canvas or paper at different costs.

If you (Isabel) email me, then I will send you a picture of the hypercube that illustrates the 14641 of Pascal's triangle, and a similar figure in the 5 cube. Essentially, one can see the recursion relations (both binomial and multinomial) in terms of intersections of the planes \sum x_j = k with an appropriately sized cube. I haven't finished the 4-d drawing of the multinomial figure yet.